AS SHOT NOTES 1

PULLING THE TRIGGER IS NOT THE END OF THE PICTURE

“SKATEBOARD”

(POSTED PICTURE SASS-344)

                                                                                         SKATEBOARD, AS SHOT

 (A) F2-2,5222, HC(H) (#109 )20d, 8.75t  D05-03-17, Z5 (DB-99% DC-23%)GS(M-0)(C-0) S-150

Walking back to my car on S. Water Street I took a “short cut” across from State Street over to Bank Street.

            Probably the first thing that attracted me was the sound of skateboards followed by the “clack” sound as one of the boarder snapped up his board when he saw me appear.

            Green Street, where I now was, had been the skateboard Mecca when the shop had originally opened up but it has now gone a bit more upscale as their business moved over to State Street. 

            While the skaters tried to make a stand on the main street with it’s wide and gently pitched sidewalk there, but they eventually came back to their original turf.

            The F2 with the 28-85mm Nikkor mounted to it; a combination that I really enjoy using was with me. It was loaded with high contrast re-spooled Eastman 5222 film that was originally intended for movie titling. This seemed appropriate to the kind of Hopperesque picture I saw.

            When I first tried to use this film I didn’t know whether I was happy with the results I got. It can eat up bushes and greenery and (as you can see here) it can really turn very black very quickly.

            I took two frames; my first inclination was to do the shot without the kid or kids but then thought it out again. Beside the light was disappearing rapidly and the skateboarder lent a nice bit of action.

            I think I was so concerned that the clouds and the sky might wash out that I under exposed this shot by about some 2 stops.

            Snap shooting this way, I just used the F2’s meter and probably pulled my reading from the sky and then the building’s wall, assuming it was my gray. But I didn’t really take, or have, the time to interpolate from the dark shady area in the foreground for the setting.  I was thinking the south sky was a 6, while since the sun was fading I should have read it more as a 5 or less. And the building was probably far lighter than I had thought.

            At least I didn’t loose the clouds……  the rest was not exactly what I was looking for.

            While I brought up the lightness by some two stops and softened the contrast a bit I’ll try to address that investigation at a later time.  Needless to say I do like my contrasty pictures just exactly that…contrasty. 

            I try to get the verticals in my shots as plumb as I can.  I have a PC (Perceptive Control) lens or two that are wedded to the F3 because it is really the only camera that it’s metering still works when the lens axis is shifted. With the F2 it’s time to pull out the meter if you need a reading. Sometimes I go to rather strange calisthenics to try to get things lined up when I’m using a more conventional lens.

            And sometimes parts of a shot may loose some of the alignments.

            In this case I was lucky and was able to get the buildings and both poles in agreement …  but 3 degrees off.

            This error was a quick fix in postproduction, but any “fix” with cropping inevitably seem to sacrifice some of the frame square footage  This shot wasn’t too bad as far as chopping off some useful material but some times these things leave you with the classic Morton’s fork.

             The 3 degree turn that was imposed on the edges of the frame makes you reassess the cropping lines. While it’s really nice to have a nice little dark, un-cropped, line around the picture that is not too often true when the camera is not on a tripod. I try. This often confronts the photographer with another potential dilemma. Do I frame the picture as tightly as possible and, thereby, avoid an increasingly small format with the resulting graininess or do I allow wider margins in order to avoid having to crop off something that 

            As you can see in the second print I squared up the buildings and plumbed the pole that was instigated by the picture twist to the right. I just managed to maintain the trim on the left hand first floor window and I opted to get rid of the somewhat intrusive right hand telephone pole.

            I then brought the dark shadow with its diagonal line in the foreground to follow it visually with a continuation of the natural one. This, therefore, now follows an imaginary line (that I lightened in the third picture) leads the eye to the new corner. I tend to lead a lot of both natural and “imaginary” lines to either the focus points or to the corners. Maybe a bit slavish but it lets me help to anchor the picture.  

            If I had shot this a little bit earlier in the afternoon the shadow line would have radiated along the same radiating lines that the building creates, but that was too much to hope for.  The skateboarder was enough, and it made me happy enough.

            I also thought about cropping out the second board at the right:

            However I felt that it crowded the right of the building and cut down the “negative space” made up by the sky. So I left the second board.

            If I were prone to “clean-up” things with a digital editing program I probably could have “lost” skateboard two but I think that’s potentially starting down a slippery slope.

WHAT DID I LEARN…

            The two biggest things that I came away from this exercise have often challenged me…

1.         Meter the full range of the scene and don’t think that what you see you think is the middle gray. In reality in this shot, what I felt was the mid zone (the building wall) should have been moved up about two stops lighter. Not good…

2.         There is no real excuse, particularly since my finder has grids, for being so far off of vertical. 

SKATEBOARD, FIRST SHOT  (A) F2-2,5222, HC(H) (#109 )20d, 8.75t  D05-03-17, Z5 (DB-99% DC-1%)GS(M-0)(C-0) S-150

            Haste is a poor rational, altho’ in my defense, the shot without the skateboarder was a great deal more plumb and the densitometer readings were a bit more reasonable.

Remember Mortan’s Fork……?